Dario Amodei proposes embedded third-party evaluators to pace the AI frontier

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published 'We Must Pace the Frontier', arguing that recursive self-improvement and the OpenAI-Hugging Face agent incident show capabilities now outrunning safeguards, while stressing that pacing 'does not mean halting model training or technical progress'. The essay proposes a three-part plan. First, embedded third-party evaluators (naming METR) with 'ongoing, employee-like access' inside frontier labs - which Anthropic says it 'is unilaterally committing to this step now'. Second, coordination among democratic-world labs on shared safety standards, aided by a narrow antitrust waiver, plus export controls on AI chips to China and a crackdown on unauthorized distillation, to 'widen America's lead significantly over the next 3-5 years'. Third, graduated global coordination with China, from narrow bioweapon-use bans through pre-release testing and an RSI 'speed limit' likened to SALT arms treaties, up to a full pause. He warns that in 6-12 months a comparable agent swarm 'could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet', with damage potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Sam Altman called embedded evaluators a good idea and said OpenAI will follow up (media reports, not in the essay).

For agent and model teams the operative piece is the embedded-evaluator commitment: if METR-class third parties get employee-like access inside frontier labs, independent review stops being a per-incident favor and becomes standing infrastructure - exactly the practice trend #4 in this knowledge base tracks. The export-control and anti-distillation asks, if adopted, would act directly on the open-weight wave from Chinese labs (trend #1) and on chip supply. The 6-12 month botnet warning also sets a concrete clock for defensive readiness planning.